The New American

Young entrepreneurial Americans are doing something they have not done much before. They are leaving. And even more than our government, our military, or our movies, they are expanding American influence in the world. Even in a crazy place like Shanghai.

Barrett Comiskey sits on a couch in a factory behind a brick wall and a sign that reads SHANGHAI HONG HUI PLASTICS COMPANY. He's a thirty-two-year-old New Yorker with an open, friendly face and his shirtsleeves rolled up, sipping from a bottle of water. Across from him sits Mr. Sun, the factory's Taiwanese owner, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and still sweating, having just supervised the loading of yet another truck. His is one of the hundreds of factories here in Minhang, the manufacturing district southwest of downtown Shanghai. Minhang is the birthplace of much of America's stuff.

Mr. Sun is a tough old bastard who hits his palm with his fist when he talks. Comiskey has come to sit with him on behalf of an American client who has ordered thousands of plastic rulers with MADE IN CHINA stamped on them. Comiskey and Mr. Sun have done business before, producing parts for another of Comiskey's American clients, a vending-machine company on the East Coast. Those parts are being churned out on the factory floor this afternoon, as they almost always are, spun from bags of melted pellets by rows of injection molds and Chinese migrant workers, recent transplants from the valleys and farms.

But making plastic rulers requires an extruder, which Mr. Sun does not have in his factory. So Mr. Sun subcontracted the job to another factory, and the rulers have since tested positive for lead. Although there are no regulations in China or America restricting the lead content of rulers -- lots of plastic products, from lawn chairs to picture frames, have traces of lead in them, because lead is used as a stabilizing agent in liquid plastics -- Comiskey's client is demanding a new, lead-free batch. His client is not interested in the letter of the law. Unlike lawn chairs or picture frames, rulers sometimes end up in people's mouths.

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This Comiskey understands. His job is to understand. The next part of his job -- the harder part -- is helping either his American client or his Chinese counterpart, depending on which party finds itself lost in translation, to understand, too. Now, after a long, loud conversation in Mandarin punctuated by his incessant fist pounding, Mr. Sun comes to understand that because Americans eat their rulers, today the problem is lead.

Here, however, their understanding ends.

Mr. Sun wants to give his subcontractor another chance. That's the Asian in him.

Comiskey wants to find a different factory. That's the American in him.

He takes a sip of water and contemplates the ocean in between.

Shanghai is a fifteen-hour flight from New York but so much farther.

Comiskey landed here for the first time in 2002, when he was working on his M.B.A. at Stanford. A group of students decided to tour industrial China, wanting to see what hypercapitalism looks like, and out of so many cities, massive and teeming, Shanghai -- and its eighteen million inhabitants -- dug its elbows deepest into Comiskey's ribs.

In the rain, the city looks like the Los Angeles of Blade Runner. Every glass-and-steel skyscraper is taller and gaudier than the one thrown up in the weeks before it; spotlit billboards and an overabundance of blue neon turn dusk into dawn; a high-speed maglev train, the world's fastest, rockets from the futuristic airport into towering Pudong, an entirely new section of the city that has risen double-time out of the marshes along the river, an instant metropolis. Walking wide-eyed through the bustle, Comiskey felt the crackle of pure, unhinged commerce. "It felt like the frontier, like the Wild West," he says now. "It felt electric."

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He's yelling his memories over the music pounding at an upscale dance club. This is the last stop on an all-night bender, a Shanghai weekend staple. Saturday nights and Sunday mornings are when valves are opened and a week's worth of pressure is released into the muggy dark.

The bar is filled mostly with white men and women. These particular whites are not scruffy English-as-a-second-language teachers or hippies looking for what's become of Buddha. Those foreigners are asleep on their futons, three to a room, their bellies filled with ramen. In this obnoxious bar, at this obnoxious hour, it's all about the money, newborn millionaires toasting their success, a thousand smiling Maos folded and stuffed into their back pockets. These are Germans, Brits, Americans, a few French, most of them young, most of them rich or well on their way to being rich. They are the high-priced consultants who work for McKinsey, the emissaries for international interests in steel or copper or indium, the princes and princesses of manufacturing empires that span three quarters of the globe and have their eyes on that last quarter. These people are in love with Shanghai so long as Shanghai turns them a profit during the day and supplies them with a dance floor at night.

Comiskey watches the show and can laugh, because over the years he's been able to remove himself from it. When the sun rises and the window behind the bar fills with light, he heads out to the street, waves down a taxi, and directs the driver in his new language to his new home, the house where he's built a garden and is building a family.

In his first days in Shanghai, he thought he could help change this place, make it cleaner and fairer and better. Change has come, but it has come slowly, and while Comiskey remains an idealist, a believer in an almost quaint theory of world progress, inching forward transaction by transaction, Shanghai forced him to develop a more practical streak. He decided, instead, to let the city change him. He hasn't joined the ranks of pirates and robber barons -- the "devils with white faces," the Chinese call them -- except when he drinks in their bars just before sunrise. He is still Barrett O'Connor Comiskey, proud Irish son of New York. But in his time in this city, he has also become a new kind of American, one made in China along with everything else.

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He was drawn to Asia even before he felt Shanghai's buzz, shaking the money trees for a start-up called E Ink, which he cofounded shortly after his graduation from MIT in 1997. A mathematician by training -- he still illustrates his thoughts with napkin sketches of parabolas and vectors -- Comiskey invented magical balls of ink that alternate, on command, between black and white. They promised a future of constantly changing electronic ink. (Some of you can see it in action on the cover of special editions of this issue of Esquire.) But after spending three years perfecting E Ink's technology, he had grown weary with the company's science and wanted to try his hand at the company's art: those tricky, delicate negotiations that bring together investors and invention, building the bridges that cross the water.

America felt tapped out. Up rose Asia over his mind's horizon, and off he went. A colleague beat him to the money in Japan, but Comiskey did one better and found a future wife, Jojo, in Taiwan. Having caught the business bug while he was at it, he left E Ink, earned his M.B.A., got married on a California beach where he liked to surf, and together he and Jojo booked passage for Shanghai to make their fortune -- by selling eyeglasses.

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Guys like Comiskey, they're awake with ideas. Some of his ideas, like E Ink, had worked. Some of his ideas, like the Argentine vineyard that sold wine the way time-shares sell sunshine, had not. But along with a Shanghainese classmate at Stanford, Comiskey had come up with his young life's can't-miss.

The existing model for selling eyeglasses is flawed, he decided after a long and careful analysis. (He is an unrepentant logician, even here in Shanghai, a place that defies rationality.) Most eyeglass stores are high-inventory, low-volume enterprises, and high-inventory, low-volume enterprises are death from above and below.

Comiskey and his friend were going to change that, targeting their stores toward narrower markets: trendsetting women and children, the two groups that go through frames the quickest. And afterward, they were going to build their own shining tower into this crowded, birdless sky.

That was before Comiskey's friend -- the local partner, the one who could make sense out of Shanghai's glorious, infuriating tangle -- decided New Zealand was a better bet. Fuck New Zealand, Comiskey thought. He had his heart set on Shanghai. "It was where I wanted to be," he says.

And as luck would have it, right about then, E Ink decided it wanted to start production in China, making displays for clocks, calculators, cell phones, and electronic books. They became Comiskey's first American client, and he became their first man in Shanghai, and alone but for Jojo he began cold-knocking on factory doors.

Andrew Rowat

Andrew Rowat

Today, the problem is a woman in a surgical mask.

Comiskey has taken a taxi to Shanghai EELY-TDI-ECW Co., Ltd., another Minhang factory, the factory that first opened its doors to him. He was just Barrett Comiskey then. Now he's the managing partner -- along with another ambitious young American M.B.A., Andy Mulkerin -- of Nicobar Group, a dozen-employee go-between outfit named after an obscure archipelago off India. ("I like the idea of the company being a collection of islands," he says, "every client and project its own entity under a larger umbrella.") In the intervening years, he has worked for several American clients and has found his way into several Chinese factories. He has helped a company that refurbishes medical equipment look at building hard-to-find parts from scratch; he has helped a railway company explore a joint venture with a local casting factory; he has helped a company that supplies components for nuclear reactors ramp up its international manufacturing capability. But EELY was the start of all that helping.

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It is managed by a skinny, stressed-out, middle-aged Chinese man named Simon. (Many of the Chinese Comiskey deals with have adopted English names for our lingual benefit, but they are endearingly antiquated names. Nobody here is named Braden. They call themselves Daisy, Fanny, Henry, Arthur, as though they'd gone to the beach and picked up the names we decided we were done with and tossed into the sea.) Simon wears short-sleeved dress shirts and sits in his spartan office, his desk empty except for a laptop and an ashtray filled with butts.

He is eager to please Comiskey. Before they discuss business, Simon likes to take Comiskey for lunch at a restaurant that seats three thousand people. Simon will try to impress Comiskey by ordering lavish amounts of food, deep-fried chicken intestines and fatty wedges of pork, lotus fruit stuffed with sticky rice, freshwater shrimp in vinegar, picked over with chopsticks and washed down with big bottles of Tsingtao. As is Chinese custom, Simon will pour the beer for Comiskey, holding the bottle with his right hand but guiding it with his left, an act of deference. in return, Comiskey will pour for Simon. These are tiny, simple, but important customs. Comiskey knows and observes them like a Catholic attending Mass.

But today there is no time for lunch or ritual. Comiskey wants to see how work is progressing on the Esquire cover. EELY is responsible for making the twin display panels, and Comiskey fears they are running behind their tight schedule. In polished rooms that look like microbiology labs, workers in full-body anticontamination suits with hoods, booties, and surgical masks hunch over laser cutters and industrial laminators. It's an incredibly laborious, intensive process, fraught with potential for delays.

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"That's a problem," Comiskey says through his own surgical mask, eyeing a cardboard box in the corner filled with the excess ink film trimmed from the Esquire displays. Comiskey has asked that it be carefully sorted and kept, because even the smallest pieces can be used for something like cell-phone screens, and because it's worth a lot of money. It turns out that a woman in a surgical mask misunderstood his request and has been throwing it out. It's a misunderstanding that will cost Comiskey tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars.

He is calm in expressing his displeasure, but he expresses it, in clipped Mandarin, and after, the woman retreats to a corner. While Comiskey continues his tour of the factor, the woman follows him but keeps her distance. He can see only her eyes, and she can see only his, but each can see how the other is feeling from across the dustless room.

After a few minutes, Comiskey stops and asks her gently to come over to him. She is reluctant. She shakes her head and stays in the corner. She has seen how Americans react to Chinese mistakes. She has had Americans treat her and her friends like Jawas, as something less than human.

But Comiskey talks to her some more, in soothing tones, and then he extends his hand, palm down, and she comes to him, slowly, and their hands touch -- not in a handshake, exactly, but more tenderly, and whatever he says to her, her surgical mask stops popping in and out so quickly, and her eyes change, and in them Comiskey can see that she's smiling, and he knows that his precious inventory is gone along with his money, but he also knows that in exchange he has made a new friend who will do her best to understand him from now on.

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"Onward," he says.

He says it in English.

Shanghai is not a warm city. It is not welcoming. "People are busy," Comiskey says. When he and Jojo first came here, surrounded by so many millions, he was nearly crushed by loneliness. He couldn't speak the language; he couldn't read the street signs; Jojo was his single conduit to the world. Everything had to be filtered through her, and sometimes he felt like the boy in the bubble.

It didn't help that Shanghai's expatriate community is as insular as the Chinese can seem. There are the true expats, the mostly male executives whose wives shop on Nanjing Road and whose children attend posh international schools. They live in the suburbs with their maids and gardeners, drivers take them to their offices, and they pick up dinner at KFC or McDonald's, counting off the days until they can return home to Chicago or London or Frankfurt. They are in this city but they are not part of it. They believe, This is China, and therefore I can expect nothing. Then there are those foreigners who have integrated themselves completely -- in fact, they have gone over the wall and become Chinese in their hearts and minds. They in turn look down at the third brand of foreigner here, the relentless waves of plunderers who drink Coca-Cola and fumble with their chopsticks, the neocolonialists who believe, This is China, and therefore I can expect the world.

Comiskey set about working his way somewhere into the middle of everything and everyone. In his first difficult months, he wanted to feel at home in Shanghai, drawn into its irresistible currents, but he also wanted to stay true to his essential Americanism. He had to choose which parts of him he would fight to keep and which parts of him he was willing to lose. That's how he ended up where he is today. This is China, he believes, therefore everything is possible, but nothing is easy.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

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His office space documents his evolution in plaster and art. He opened shop in a five-story building that houses mostly painters and sculptors. As Nicobar Group has expanded, he's blown out the walls. Now he occupies three units, with his Chinese, Taiwanese, and American employees spread between them, busy at their desks.

The first, the original suite, he calls New York. It looks like a SoHo loft, with exposed pipes and high ceilings and black-and-white photographs of the Chrysler Building on the exposed-brick walls. It was built by a man who missed home. The second suite is Minhang, the factory, with lab benches and industrial lighting. It was built by a man who had become enamored with industry. The third suite is Shanghai. It was built by a man who had flat-out fallen in love. One half has been decorated in 1930s art deco, reminiscent of the city's romantic jazz age, with floral wallpaper, Tiffany lamps, and custom leather furniture. Comiskey has also put up a collection of antique American posters. They read like Chinese propaganda -- What Is Good for Industry Is Good for Your Family and Let's All Work Together -- but they were produced by the National Association of Manufacturers. It's funny to see how much China has become what we once were.

Andrew Rowat

Andrew Rowat

Today, the problem is a woman in a surgical mask.

Comiskey has taken a taxi to Shanghai EELY-TDI-ECW Co., Ltd., another Minhang factory, the factory that first opened its doors to him. He was just Barrett Comiskey then. Now he's the managing partner--along with another ambitious young American M.B.A., Andy Mulkerin--of Nicobar Group, a dozen-employee go-between outfit named after an obscure archipelago off India. ("I like the idea of the company being a collection of islands," he says, "every client and project its own entity under a larger umbrella.") In the intervening years, he has worked for several American clients and has found his way into several Chinese factories. He has helped a company that refurbishes medical equipment look at building hard-to-find parts from scratch; he has helped a railway company explore a joint venture with a local casting factory; he has helped a company that supplies components for nuclear reactors ramp up its international manufacturing capability. But EELY was the start of all that helping.

It is managed by a skinny, stressed-out, middle-aged Chinese man named Simon. (Many of the Chinese Comiskey deals with have adopted English names for our lingual benefit, but they are endearingly antiquated names. Nobody here is named Braden. They call themselves Daisy, Fanny, Henry, Arthur, as though they'd gone to the beach and picked up the names we decided we were done with and tossed into the sea.) Simon wears short-sleeved dress shirts and sits in his spartan office, his desk empty except for a laptop and an ashtray filled with butts.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

He is eager to please Comiskey. Before they discuss business, Simon likes to take Comiskey for lunch at a restaurant that seats three thousand people. Simon will try to impress Comiskey by ordering lavish amounts of food, deep-fried chicken intestines and fatty wedges of pork, lotus fruit stuffed with sticky rice, freshwater shrimp in vinegar, picked over with chopsticks and washed down with big bottles of Tsingtao. As is Chinese custom, Simon will pour the beer for Comiskey, holding the bottle with his right hand but guiding it with his left, an act of deference. In return, Comiskey will pour for Simon. These are tiny, simple, but important customs. Comiskey knows and observes them like a Catholic attending Mass.

But today there is no time for lunch or ritual. Comiskey wants to see how work is progressing on the Esquire cover. EELY is responsible for making the twin display panels, and Comiskey fears they are running behind their tight schedule. In polished rooms that look like microbiology labs, workers in full-body anticontamination suits with hoods, booties, and surgical masks hunch over laser cutters and industrial laminators. It's an incredibly laborious, intensive process, fraught with potential for delays.

"That's a problem," Comiskey says through his own surgical mask, eyeing a cardboard box in the corner filled with the excess ink film trimmed from the Esquire displays. Comiskey had asked that it be carefully sorted and kept, because even the smallest pieces can be used for something like cell-phone screens, and because it's worth a lot of money. It turns out that a woman in a surgical mask misunderstood his request and has been throwing it out. It's a misunderstanding that will cost Comiskey tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

He is calm in expressing his displeasure, but he expresses it, in clipped Mandarin, and after, the woman retreats to a corner. While Comiskey continues his tour of the factory, the woman follows him but keeps her distance. He can see only her eyes, and she can see only his, but each can see how the other is feeling from across the dustless room.

After a few minutes, Comiskey stops and asks her gently to come over to him. She is reluctant. She shakes her head and stays in the corner. She has seen how Americans react to Chinese mistakes. She has had Americans treat her and her friends like Jawas, as something less than human.

But Comiskey talks to her some more, in soothing tones, and then he extends his hand, palm down, and she comes to him, slowly, and their hands touch--not in a handshake, exactly, but more tenderly, and whatever he says to her, her surgical mask stops popping in and out so quickly, and her eyes change, and in them Comiskey can see that she's smiling, and he knows that his precious inventory is gone along with his money, but he also knows that in exchange he has made a new friend who will do her best to understand him from now on.

"Onward," he says.

He says it in English.

Shanghai is not a warm city. It is not welcoming. "People are busy," Comiskey says. When he and Jojo first came here, surrounded by so many millions, he was nearly crushed by the loneliness. He couldn't speak the language; he couldn't read the street signs; Jojo was his single conduit to the world. Everything had to be filtered through her, and sometimes he felt like the boy in the bubble.

It didn't help that Shanghai's expatriate community is as insular as the Chinese can seem. There are the true expats, the mostly male executives whose wives shop on Nanjing Road and whose children attend posh international schools. They live in the suburbs with their maids and gardeners, drivers take them to their offices, and they pick up dinner at KFC or McDonald's, counting off the days until they can return home to Chicago or London or Frankfurt. They are in this city but they are not part of it. They believe, This is China, and therefore I can expect nothing. Then there are those foreigners who have integrated themselves completely--in fact, they have gone over the wall and become Chinese in their hearts and minds. They in turn look down at the third brand of foreigner here, the relentless waves of plunderers who drink Coca-Cola and fumble with their chopsticks, the neocolonialists who believe, This is China, and therefore I can expect the world.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Comiskey set about working his way somewhere into the middle of everything and everyone. In his first difficult months, he wanted to feel at home in Shanghai, drawn into its irresistible currents, but he also wanted to stay true to his essential Americanism. He had to choose which parts of him he would fight to keep and which parts of him he was willing to lose. That's how he ended up where he is today. This is China, he believes, therefore everything is possible, but nothing is easy.

His office space documents his evolution in plaster and art. He opened shop in a five-story building that houses mostly painters and sculptors. As Nicobar Group has expanded, he's blown out the walls. Now he occupies three units, with his Chinese, Taiwanese, and American employees spread between them, busy at their desks.

The first, the original suite, he calls New York. It looks like a SoHo loft, with exposed pipes and high ceilings and black-and-white photographs of the Chrysler Building on the exposed-brick walls. It was built by a man who missed home. The second suite is Minhang, the factory, with lab benches and industrial lighting. It was built by a man who had become enamored with industry. The third suite is Shanghai. It was built by a man who had flat-out fallen in love. One half has been decorated in 1930s art deco, reminiscent of the city's romantic jazz age, with floral wallpaper, Tiffany lamps, and custom leather furniture. Comiskey has also put up a collection of antique American posters. They read like Chinese propaganda--What Is Good for Industry Is Good for Your Family and Let's All Work Together--but they were produced by the National Association of Manufacturers. It's funny to see how much China has become what we once were.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

One afternoon, Comiskey takes his next great leap into his new life. He decides to buy a car. Most foreigners wouldn't dream of driving here. The roads are lawless, except that cars must turn right on a red light without stopping. That, combined with millions of new drivers, thousands of poorly maintained trucks, and gaggles of bell-ringing bicycles, has turned Shanghai's congested streets into a gladiator pit. Comiskey, however, is tired of being driven. The American in him wants to drive, and he's waded through China's arduous bureaucracy--it's what he does--to get his license. Now he's off to the local Shuanghuan dealership to take a SCEO for a spin.

It looks suspiciously like a BMW X5.

The Chinese call it an "homage." The Germans--and most Americans--would call it "stealing." It's a perfect copy, at least in looks. (The engine is a Mitsubishi.) The young salesman helpfully tells Comiskey that 90 percent of customers ask for the logos to be removed and replaced with BMW's. He also points out that the BMW retails for $130,000 here. The Shuanghuan SCEO goes for $20,000, fully loaded.

Comiskey is nervous about how his clients, who fear the stealing of their own ideas, might react to his driving a forgery. "From my research, Shuanghuan hasn't broken laws," he says, smiling, when he pulls onto the highway. "I hope people think it shows my practical side." Given its lack of guts coming up the ramp, the Shuanghuan is clearly not a BMW where it counts, but like most things made by the Chinese, it occupies that sweet spot between good enough and cheap enough.

He pulls off the highway and takes to the streets. One of Comiskey's friends is working on a massive new housing development out here, the kind of sweeping construction project that would be next to impossible back home, and he wants to take a look at what can still happen here. It is acres of towering apartment blocks, going up a dozen at a time, set against distinctly artificial touches of American suburbia. The world's largest skate park sits somewhere among the graded, empty fields and rows of billboards that celebrate our good fortune, blessed to have found ourselves in A CITY ZONE OF SHANGHAI NEW DREAM.

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Comiskey stumbles upon the skate park and stops in for a peek. It's an enormous collection of bowls, ramps, and half-pipes. It's maybe a year old, but already the concrete is cracking. ("Things look old in Shanghai really quickly," he says, walking through the open, unmanned gates.) There are no skateboarders. There is a lone man squatting near the bottom of one bowl, which is half filled with water. He emerges carrying a plastic bag filled with small freshwater lobster--crayfish, really--that he's just caught for dinner.

Nothing in Shanghai lives as it was born. America is built on intention, everything planned and focused and engineered and intractable. Here, nothing is static. Everything is in flux. Everything evolves. "Everything's negotiable," Comiskey says, climbing back behind the wheel of his new car. He didn't grow up dreaming of driving a Shuanghuan, but right now, it will get him where he wants to go.

Today, the problem is a scam.

Comiskey is eating lunch on a restaurant patio when his phone rings. It's an American friend here in Shanghai on business. "I'm in a spot," the friend says. "There's a big bill . . ."

"Tell me where you are, and I'll fix it," Comiskey says, already rising from his seat.

Unfortunately, the friend doesn't know where he is, except in a spot.

Comiskey jumps in a taxi, his phone still pressed to his ear. "I need to know where you are. What's happening? What can you see?"

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The details emerge in sketchy, short bursts.

A restaurant with a green sign, up some stairs. A pretty Chinese girl. A bill for 3,000 yuan--more than $400. A windowless back room with a big angry man in it, wanting to be paid.

The friend is scared.

In Shanghai, it's called "getting worked." It almost always starts with a girl. In this case, the friend was trying to buy a cell phone and got lost in the bewildering, overheated chaos of People's Square. Cars honking, bicycles zipping past, the sidewalks crowded and suffocating. He was sweaty and disoriented when an angel appeared out of the crush.

She asked if he needed help. He said that he did. She helped.

Then she asked if he wanted to go for lunch. He said that he did, and they went.

She picked the restaurant. They ate eel. Then she ordered a glass of wine. Then another glass, then another glass, and then another. Finally, Comiskey's friend said he had to get going. He asked for the bill.

Lunch was reasonable enough. The wine, not so much. The restaurant's manager said the wine was very expensive. The wine was probably plonk. It was maybe even water.

"I need to know where you are," Comiskey says again.

The friend suddenly remembers a street name.

"That's a long street. I need something else."

Comiskey directs the taxi driver toward the long street.

"Yeah, okay. Put him on the phone."

The friend gives his phone to the manager. Comiskey begins barking at him in Mandarin.

"Are you Chinese?" the manager asks.

"Yes," Comiskey says. "Tell me your address."

"What are you going to do?" the manager says. "This is just business."

The manager throws the phone back to the friend.

"Listen to me," Comiskey says, sounding rattled for the first time. "You need to get out of there. Just get out of there."

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The taxi gets stuck in traffic on the long street. There are many restaurants with green signs, up some stairs. There is a lot of everything in Shanghai. It all begins to blur.

The friend's voice is shaking.

"Get out of there," Comiskey says again.

Finally, the friend hears him. Finally, he obeys. He sees an opening past the big angry man and finds his courage and bolts from the back room, into the restaurant. He throws 200 yuan on the table and runs down the stairs. He's back in the sun on the street and gulps down the polluted air. The crowds, so maddening before, feel like armor, or a blanket. They surround him and he's safe.

Comiskey picks his friend out from the thousands and bundles him into the taxi.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes," the friend says, although he's clearly not. "I'm all right."

"It's okay," Comiskey says. "It's okay."

The friend wipes the sweat from his forehead and begins to catch his breath.

"It's okay."

Andrew Rowat

One afternoon, Comiskey takes his next great leap into his new life. He decides to buy a car. Most foreigners wouldn't dream of driving here. The roads are lawless, except that cars must turn right on a red light without stopping. That, combined with millions of new drivers, thousands of poorly maintained trucks, and gaggles of bell-ringing bicycles, has turned Shanghai's congested streets into a gladiator pit. Comiskey, however, is tired of being driven. The American in him wants to drive, and he's waded through China's arduous bureaucracy -- it's what he does -- to get his license. Now he's off to the local Shuanghuan dealership to take a SCEO for a spin.

It looks suspiciously like a BMW X5.

The Chinese call it an "homage." The Germans -- and most Americans -- would call it "stealing." It's a perfect copy, at least in looks. (The engine is Mitsubishi.) The young salesman helpfully tells Comiskey that 90 percent of customers ask for the logos to be removed and replaced with BMW's. He also points out that the BMW retails for $130,000 here. The Shuanghuan SCEO goes for $20,000, fully loaded.

Comiskey is nervous about how his clients, who fear the stealing of their own ideas, might react to his driving a forgery. "From my research, Shuanghuan hasn't broken laws," he says, smiling, when he pulls onto the highway. "I hope people think it shows my practical side." Given its lack of guts coming up the ramp, the Shuanghuan is clearly not a BMW where it counts, but like most things made by the Chinese, it occupies that sweet spot between good enough and cheap enough.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

He pulls off the highway and takes to the streets. One of Comiskey's friends is working on a massive new housing development out here, the kind of sweeping construction project that would be next to impossible back home, and he wants to take a look at what can still happen here. It is acres of towering apartment blocks, going up a dozen at a time, set against distinctly artificial touches of American suburbia. The world's largest skate park sits somewhere among the graded, empty fields and rows of billboards that celebrate our good fortune, blessed to have found ourselves in A CITY ZONE OF SHANGHAI NEW DREAM.

Comiskey stumbles upon the skate park and stops in for a peek. It's an enormous collection of bowls, ramps, and half-pipes. It's maybe a year old, but already the concrete is cracking. ("Things look old in Shanghai really quickly," he says, walking through the open, unmanned gates.) There are no skateboarders. There is a lone man squatting near the bottom of one bowl, which is half filled with water. He emerges carrying a plastic bag filled with small freshwater lobster -- crayfish, really -- that he's just caught for dinner.

Nothing in Shanghai lives as it was born. America is built on intention, everything planned and focused and engineered and intractable. Here, nothing is static. Everything is in flux. Everything evolves. "Everything's negotiable," Comiskey says, climbing back behind the wheel of his new car. He didn't grow up dreaming of driving a Shanghuan, but right now, it will get him where he wants to go.

Today, the problem is a scam.

Comiskey is eating lunch on a restaurant patio when his phone rings. It's an American friend here in Shanghai on business. "I'm in a spot," the friend says. "There's a big bill..."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

"Tell me where you are, and I'll fix it," Comiskey says, already rising from his seat.

Unfortunately, the friend doesn't know where he is, except in a spot.

Comiskey jumps in a taxi, his phone still pressed to his ear. "I need to know where you are. What's happening? What can you see?"

The details emerge in sketchy, short bursts.

A restaurant with a green sign, up some stairs. A pretty Chinese girl. A bill for 3,000 yuan -- more than $400. A windowless back room with a big angry man in it, wanting to be paid.

The friend is scared.

In Shanghai, it's called "getting worked." It almost always starts with a girl. In this case, the friend was trying to buy a cell phone and got lost in the bewildering, overheated chaos of People's Square. Cars honking, bicycles zipping past, the sidewalks crowded and suffocating. He was sweaty and disoriented when an angel appeared out of the crush.

She asked if he needed help. He said that he did. She helped.

Then she asked if he wanted to go for lunch. He said that he did, and they went.

She picked the restaurant. They ate eel. Then she ordered a glass of wine. Then another glass, then another glass, and then another. Finally, Comiskey's friend said he had to get going. He asked for the bill.

Lunch was reasonable enough. The wine, not so much. The restaurant's manager said the wine was very expensive. The wine was probably plonk. It was maybe even water.

"I need to know where you are," Comiskey says again.

The friend suddenly remembers a street name.

"That's a long street. I need something else."

Comiskey directs the taxi driver toward the long street.

"Yeah, okay. Put him on the phone."

The friend gives his phone to the manager. Comiskey begins barking at him in Mandarin.

"Are you Chinese?" the manager asks.

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"Yes," Comiskey says. "Tell me your address."

"What are you going to do?" the manager says. "This is just business."

The manager throws the phone back to the friend.

"Listen to me," Comiskey says, sounding rattled for the first time. "You need to get out of there. Just get out of there."

The taxi gets stuck in traffic on the long street. There are many restaurants with green signs, up some stairs. There is a lot of everything in Shanghai. It all begins to blur.

The friend's voice is shaking.

"Get out of there," Comiskey says again.

Finally, the friend hears him. Finally, he obeys. He sees an opening past the big angry man and finds his courage and bolts from the back room, into the restaurant. He throws 200 yuan on the table and runs down the stairs. He's back in the sun on the street and gulps down the polluted air. The crowds, so maddening before, feel like armor, or a blanket. They surround him and he's safe.

Comiskey picks his friend out from the thousands and bundles him into the taxi.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes," the friend says, although clearly he's not. "I'm all right."

"It's okay," Comiskey says. "It's okay."

The friend wipes the sweat from his forehead and begins to catch his breath.

"It's okay."

On its worst days -- like today -- Shanghai can seem like a soulless, selfish place. For all its fetishistic beer pouring, the city can be startling in its callousness, a function of an otherworldly pace and scale. Walking is a contact sport. Motorcycles race down sidewalks. Fights break out on the crowded subway platforms and over taxis. The police seem too busy bugging phones and reading other people's e-mails to be bothered minding the chaos. A Canadian model, forced into dancing and wanting badly to go home, ends up stabbed to death in a hallway. She joins the permanent ranks of Shanghai's voracious supply side.

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On its worst days--like today--Shanghai can seem like a soulless, selfish place. For all its fetishistic beer pouring, the city can be startling in its callousness, a function of an otherworldly pace and scale. Walking is a contact sport. Motorcycles race down sidewalks. Fights break out on the crowded subway platforms and over taxis. The police seem too busy bugging phones and reading other people's e-mails to be bothered minding the chaos. A Canadian model, forced into dancing and wanting badly to go home, ends up stabbed to death in a hallway. She joins the permanent ranks of Shanghai's voracious supply side.

The city's all engine. There are no parks and there are no oases, unless you carve them out yourself. (Stepping into the relative quiet of Comiskey's garden, behind its high wall, feels like diving underwater.) In those rare parts of the city where the sky suddenly opens up--somewhere like the French Concession, where most of the foreigners live, with its Irish pubs, cob-blestone streets, and treelined boulevards--it can seem just as quickly closed off by pollution and vapor trails. Sometimes when Comiskey goes back to the U. S., he feels like the returning veteran of a foreign war. "Like I've returned to the land of milk and honey," he says. Even New York seems like a quaint English village in comparison.

He probably wouldn't have made it here without Jojo. She wouldn't let him stay an outsider. She didn't want to be his translator for life. Early in their relationship, she took him to spend some time in Taiwan, a gentler place, more laid-back and even-keeled, and there she nurtured a side of Comiskey that might never have surfaced had he remainedexclusively in Shanghai, or in America for that matter. She didn't make him type B, exactly. But she encouraged the surfer's humility in him. He had been the kind of boy who always finished first. Jojo taught Comiskey that in Asia, and in Shanghai especially, it was okay for the other guy to win, too.

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Which is why he doesn't feel guilty about the work he does here. Sometimes he gets a call from a new client and knows right away what the conversation is really about behind the corporatespeak: It's about closing factories, downsizing and rightsizing, lowering costs, increasing margins. The better he is at his job, the more Americans will lose theirs. But he isn't looking out his window at Detroit, and he isn't in St. Louis. He's in Shanghai. His perspective is global. And from here, through his window, it looks as though America has finally returned to its former role of exporter: not of goods, but of good. Of money, of technical expertise, of brainpower, but also of more important things. It's the reason Mr. Sun understands today why rulers shouldn't have lead in them. It's also why Comiskey finally decides to give Mr. Sun's subcontractor another chance to make things right, and it's why Comiskey can smile through a hundred daily frustrations punctuated by the occasional calamity: He has a missionary's zeal. He will make everything better. He is the American. He is the fixer.

Maybe the new Americans can help make China into something better than it is today. But maybe they can help us change along the way. Among the things that Comiskey's learned: Maybe we don't have all the answers. "Americans have every right to be proud of their country, but maybe we're not respectful enough of other countries," he says. "It's like we don't care what happens to anybody else. We have to become better integrated into the world and its economy. We have to become more than a destination for products and a source of culture. We have to be willing to make some serious changes in how we see the world and the world sees us."

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Comiskey can remember the moment he finally saw clearly. He was in another meeting at another factory about another problem. He had been in Shanghai for nearly a year. He still didn't speak the language. Jojo was still his only conduit. The factory's manager was talking, and Jojo was turning to Comiskey to translate, and suddenly he realized that he knew what she was going to say. He knew what the manager had said. It all made sense. As though in an instant, this seemingly incomprehensible language was English to him. And along with it, this impenetrable country was his, too. He didn't go over the wall; the wall came down. Suddenly, almost miraculously, his world opened up, and he saw then, in that meeting, this future for himself and for his new country. That's when he first thought, I live in the land of the possible.

One night, the Stanford Symphony Orchestra comes to town. Comiskey gets tickets. He goes with a couple of friends to the gorgeous new recital hall in Pudong. Rain is falling outside, and everyone is soggy, the steam coming off their shoulders. Waiting for the music to begin, a strange feeling fills the room, a kind of emptying out, like everyone is exhaling after their hard, hustling days and sinking deeper into their seats.

The orchestra takes the stage. These kids are unmistakably American. They are mostly white, mostly big, mostly healthy, mostly privileged. They wear tuxedos and black dresses, cradling their cellos and violins, their music printed on crisp white pages in a language that only people like them know. One of the trombone players has muttonchop sideburns; the tuba player has a white man's Afro, curly blond. Spend enough time in Shanghai and even American college kids can look alien, Palo Alto becoming the moon.

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The conductor stares down the audience, waiting for an American brand of quiet that's unfamiliar in Shanghai. At last he lifts his baton, and the music starts. It's like a gift. It's soaring and beautiful, providing the open space that we've all been missing. Two hours pass in twenty minutes.

After, back out in the rain, pushing toward the jammed night subway out of neon Pudong, Comiskey's asked if seeing the concert made him miss home.

"No," he says, jumping a puddle. "I am home."

Today, the solution is an umbrella.

A typhoon has hit southern China. In Shanghai, hundreds of miles to the north, it's arrived as the heavy, flooding rain that soaked the symphony audience. On the long, muddy road in between, Comiskey is told, a truck has bogged down. The truck is carrying the small batteries that need to be soldered to the circuit boards that drive the E Ink displays for the Esquire cover. Seven different companies are making parts for the boards in seven different factories. The batteries from southern China drive them all.

But the story of the truck is not true, not entirely. Like a lot of stories in China, the truth is worse than the party line; the Chinese hate so much to deliver bad news.

Comiskey heads out for EELY to find out the real story, and Simon cracks. It's true that a typhoon has hit southern China. It's probably true that several trucks are stuck on the road between here and there. But none of those trucks contains Comiskey's batteries. The batteries never left the factory. More than two hundred thousand of them were destroyed in the flood. The battery supplier will have to begin making them all over again.

It's June 30. The first batch of boards was supposed to be shipped on July 3.

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"That's not going to happen," Comiskey says.

Compounding the problem is a new government edict. The rules can change in China overnight. A few nights ago, they did.

Beginning July 1, because of the Beijing Olympics and security concerns, the government will ban the shipment of anything classified as "dangerous goods" through eight mainland airports, including Shanghai's, for the next three months.

Somehow, batteries have fallen under the classification.

Comiskey asks for the batteries to be tested in a government lab that will prove they are safe. He needs, in essence, for the government to change its own mind, which is like hoping for the rain to turn into rose petals, and he knows this to be true.

He wonders about the cost of sending a boat to Japan, filled with batteries that don't yet exist.

He lives in the land of the possible, after all. There are many more problems in China than there are in America. But there are many more solutions.

Simon stutters smoke through his nostrils. He's worried that Comiskey is upset. Simon thinks now is probably a good time for lunch. Comiskey agrees.

They go to their usual restaurant. Simon orders. The food arrives in great piles. Glasses are filled with beer, emptied, filled, and emptied again.

Outside, the rain continues to fall. The car is a short walk away. Simon doesn't have his umbrella. Comiskey opens his and gestures to Simon.

Simon steps out of the rain and under the umbrella. The two men, one American, one Chinese, begin walking to the car together, in step and safe from the rain.

The city's all engine. There are no parks and there are no oases, unless you carve them out yourself. (Stepping into the relative quiet of Comiskey's garden, behind its high wall, feels like diving underwater.) In those rare parts of the city where the sky suddenly opens up -- somewhere like the French Concession, where most of the foreigners live, with its Irish pubs, cobblestone streets, and treelined boulevards -- it can seem just as quickly closed off by pollution and vapor trails. Sometimes when Comiskey goes back to the U.S., he feels like the returning veteran of a foreign war. "Like I've returned to the land of milk and honey," he says. Even New York seems like a quaint English village in comparison.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

He probably wouldn't have made it here without Jojo. She wouldn't let him stay an outsider. She didn't want to be his translator for life. Early in their relationship, she took him to spend some time in Taiwan, a gentler place,more laid-back and even-keeled, and there she nurtured a side of Comiskey that might never have surfaced had he remained exclusively in Shanghai, or in America for that matter. She didn't make him type B, exactly. But she encouraged the surfer humility in him. He had been the kind of boy who always finished first. Jojo taught Comiskey that in Asia, and in Shanghai especially, it was okay for the other guy to win, too.

Which is why he doesn't feel guilty about the work he does here. Sometimes he gets a call from a new client and knows right away what the conversation is really about behind the corporatespeak: It's about closing factories, downsizing and rightsizing, lowering costs, increasing margins. The better he is at his job, the more Americans will lose theirs. But he isn't looking out his window at Detroit, and he isn't in St. Louis. He's in Shanghai. His perspective is global. And from here, through his window, it looks as though America has finally returned to is former role of exporter: not of goods, but of good. Of money, of technical expertise, of brain-power, but also of more important things. It's the reason Mr. Sun understands today why rulers shouldn't have lead in them. It's also why Comiskey finally decides to five Mr. Sun's subcontractor another chance to make things right, and it's why Comiskey can smile through a hundred daily frustrations punctuated by the occasional calamity: He has a missionary's zeal. He will make everything better. He is the American. He is the fixer.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Maybe the new Americans can help make China into something better than it is today. But maybe they can help us change along the way. Among the things that Comiskey's learned: Maybe we don't have all the answers. "Americans have every right to be proud of their country, but maybe we're not respectful enough of other countries," he says. "It's like we don't care what happens to anybody else. We have to become better integrated into the world and its economy. We have to become more than a destination for products and a source of culture. We have to be willing to make some serious changes in how we see the world and the world sees us."

Comiskey can remember the moment he finally saw clearly. He was in another meeting at another factory about another problem. He had been in Shanghai for nearly a year. He still didn't speak the language. Jojo was still his only conduit. The factory's manager was talking, and Jojo was turning to Comiskey to translate, and suddenly he realized that he knew what she was going to say. He knew what the manager had said. It all made sense. As though in an instant, this seemingly incomprehensible language was English to him. And along with it, this impenetrable country was his, to. He didn't go over the wall; the wall came down. Suddenly, almost miraculously, his world opened up, and he saw then, in that meeting, this future for himself and for his new country. That's when he first through, I live in the land of the possible.

One night, the Stanford Symphony Orchestra comes to town. Comiskey gets tickets. He goes with a couple of friends to the gorgeous new recital hall in Pudong. Rain is falling outside, and everyone is soggy, the steam coming off their shoulders. Waiting for the music to begin, a strange feelings fills the room, a kind of emptying out, like everyone is exhaling after their hard, hustling days and sinking deeper into their seats.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The orchestra takes the stage. These kids are unmistakably American. They are mostly white, mostly big, mostly healthy, mostly privileged. They wear tuxedos and black dresses, cradling their cellos and violins, their music printed on crisp white pages in a language that only people like them know. One of the trombone players has muttonchop sideburns; the tuba player has a white man's Afro, curly blond. Spend enough time in Shanghai and even American kids can look alien, Palo Alto becoming the moon.

The conductor stares down the audience, waiting for an American brand of quiet that's unfamiliar in Shanghai. At last he lifts his baton, and the music starts. It's like a gift. It's soaring and beautiful, providing the open space that we've all been missing. Two hours pass in twenty minutes.

After, back out in the rain, pushing toward the jammed night subway out of neon Pudong. Comiskey's asked if seeing the concert made him miss home.

"No," he says, jumping a puddle. "I am home."

Today, the solution is an umbrella.

A typhoon has hit southern China. In Shanghai, hundreds of miles to the north, it's arrived as the heavy, flooding rain that soaked the symphony audience. On the long, muddy road in between, Comiskey is told, a truck has bogged down. The truck is carrying the small batteries that need to be soldered to the circuit boards that drive the E Ink displays for the Esquire cover. Seven different companies are making parts for the boards in seven different factories. The batteries from southern China drive them all.

But the story of the truck is not true, not entirely. Like a lot of stories in China, the truth is worse than the party line; the Chinese hate so much to deliver bad news.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Comiskey heads out for EELY to find out the real story, and Simon cracks. It's true that a typhoon has hit southern China. It's probably true that several trucks are stuck on the road between here and there. But none of those trucks contains Comiskey's batteries. The batteries never left the factory. More than two hundred thousand of them were destroyed in the flood. The battery supplier will have to begin making them all over again.

It's June 30. The first batch of boards was supposed to be shipped on July 3.

"That's not going to happen," Comiskey says.

Compounding the problem is a new government edict. The rules can change in China overnight. A few nights ago, they did.

Beginning July 1, because of the Beijing Olympics and security concerns, the government will ban the shipment of anything classified as "dangerous goods" through eight mainland airports, including Shanghai's, for the next three months.

Somehow, batteries have fallen under the classification.

Comiskey asks for the batteries to be tested in a government lab that will prove they are safe. He needs, in essence, for the government to change its own mind, which is like hoping for the rain to turn into rose petals, and he knows this to be true.

He wonders about the cost of sending a boat to Japan, filled with batteries that don't yet exist.

He lives in the land of the possible, after all. There are many more problems in China than there are in America. But there are many more solutions.

Simon stutters smoke through his nostrils He's worried that Comiskey is upset. Simon thinks now is probably a good time for lunch. Comiskey agrees.

They go to their usual restaurant. Simon orders. The food arrives in great piles. Glasses are filled with beer, emptied, filled, and emptied again.

Outside, the rain continues to fall. The car is a short walk away. Simon doesn't have his umbrella. Comiskey opens his and gestures to Simon.

Simon steps out of the rain and under the umbrella. The two men, one American, one Chinese, begin walking to the car together, in step and safe from the rain.

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